Double Happiness

by Joe Bennett

  Do you believe in God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth?

  Do you believe in Jesus Christ, His only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried? He descended into hell. On the third day He rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father. From thence He will come to judge the living and the dead.

  Do you believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting?

  Following each question, the candidate answers by saying, ‘Yes, I believe.’ If the candidate is a child, the godparents are to answer the questions. (Italics mine.)

  Thus they tell the child what it believes before it is capable of speech. They speak on its behalf. They presume on its intelligence. They seek to colonize its brain. They give it a handicap that it will have to overcome, if it is ever to exercise the faculty that distinguishes us from the animal kingdom. They present it with an engrained mental mythology that contradicts all the evidence that will confront it. They tell it that the dead aren’t dead; that rotten flesh comes back to life; that there’s a ghost; that there’s a place of punishment after you die and a place of reward. All without evidence. All in defiance of reason.

  Now it’s possible, of course, that all this stuff is true. But if so, you might have thought that a god who was capable of knocking up heaven and earth would also be capable of convincing us of that truth without the intercession of fallible human beings. But no, the kid cannot be allowed to use his power of, presumably god-given, reason because otherwise he might get it wrong. And then he’d fry.

  As with all bullshit, the aim is to achieve power over the bullshittee. If you plant this stuff in his or her little head early enough, what can you then not make him or her do? You’ve installed Big Brother.

  Reason seeks answers to questions. Essentially reason moves from the known towards the unknown. You gather the evidence first, the stuff you can show to be true: that, say, the planets move about the night sky in a particular pattern. Then you ask why. The theory you reach must accommodate the evidence. If it doesn’t, either the evidence or the theory or both must be false.

  The big word is why? As far as we know, the concept of why is unique to human beings. When children first learn to ask it they can be annoying.

  It’s time for bed, my darling.

  Why?

  Because seven o’clock is bedtime.

  Why?

  Because you need a lot of sleep at your age.

  Why?

  Well, to be honest my darling, I don’t know.

  Why?

  Look sweetie, go to bed or there won’t be any ice cream tomorrow.

  Why?

  Because I said so.

  Why cuts swiftly to the nub of things. And in doing so, why exposes ignorance and bullshit. So it is in the bullshitter’s interest to repress why.

  One way is to indoctrinate, as illustrated above. A fractionally subtler way is to pretend to share the same spirit of enquiry. Here’s the opening of the Shorter Catechism of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

  Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?

  A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

  Q. 2. What rule hath God given to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him?

  A. The word of God, which is contained in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him.

  Q. 3. What do the scriptures principally teach?

  A. The scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man.

  Q. 4. What is God?

  A. God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.

  And so on for 107 questions and answers.

  Superficially this looks like human enquiry at work. But it is exactly the opposite. Its sole purpose is not to foster enquiry but to suppress it. The trick lies in the questions. They aren’t questions. Questions, by definition, precede answers. But here the answers come first. The only purpose of the questions is to invite a recitation of dogma. The questions resemble the patsies put to a Government minister in Parliament by someone on the same side. ‘I’m very glad you asked that,’ says the minister and trots out the prepared response.

  Only one word is required to cut through this pap: why. Respond to any of these supposed answers, these ‘truths’, with why, and the Presbyterian church can only answer, ‘Because I said so.’

  Why?

  Because someone said so to me.

  Why?

  Because they wanted me to believe.

  Why?

  Because, and so evasively, but revealingly, on.

  This catechism, any catechism, aims merely to inculcate a host of unverifiable assertions, dogma that no dog would swallow. And the formula of the catechism is an implicit compliment to the same reasoning faculty that the dogmatists are terrified of and that they are doing all they can to suppress. It’s mimicry to avoid predation.

  26

  All hands to the pump

  The Press and Linden Leaves are offering all subscribers the chance to win 1 of 16 Linden Leaves Rugby Essentials Sets endorsed by All Black legend, Justin Marshall.’

  If you are unfamiliar with the company Linden Leaves you may like to guess what a set of ‘rugby essentials’ comprises. Boots, perhaps? A ball? A little beer? No. It comprises ‘a pump dispenser bottle of fabulous, nourishing shave oil’, ‘an all over body moisturizer to lock in hydration on a daily basis’ and ‘a natural exfoliating tube of facial scrub’ (and I would be interested to learn what a natural exfoliating tube looks like and where it grows).

  Here we have the transfer of expertise (Justin Marshall was a fine half-back but his dermatological qualifications are, I suspect, scant), the pseudo-scientific appeal of ‘hydration’ and ‘exfoliating’, the come-on of ‘natural’ and the effort to yoke cosmetics, somewhat improbably, to the emotional juggernaut of the national rugby team. But there is another technique employed here which is among the most pervasive and corrosive of all. It is verbal inflation.

  Though I have no doubt these splendid cosmetics would transform the most grizzled prop forward into a lissom boulevardier with skin as sweet as milk, that still doesn’t render them essential. Most rugby players manage to live without them. To describe them as essential debases the currency of language. For if cosmetics are essential, how do you describe food, water and shelter? Essential essentials?

  There is similar inflation in the ‘fabulous’ shave oil. Deriving from fable, the word suggests that ancients sitting round campfires told awe-drenched stories of this shave oil, setting it above and apart from the dull diurnal world. This is a shave oil of mythological status.

  Legend belongs to the same word stable. It suggests that Mr Marshall is the distillation of virtues, a hero of tales handed down from generation to generation, refined and simplified by repetition until they enshrine some fundamental truth. He isn’t. He’s a gutsy half-back from Mataura.

  Such inflation, such hyperbole, assails us constantly. Last weekend I was in Rotorua. I spent a morning peering into holes, at the base of which lay steaming, glooping mud. I imagined falling in and dying, lobster-like, boiled by the earth. Here there was no denying that we stand on the thin skin of a cooling planet, a planet that obeys the laws of physics rather than us, that has no interest in our welfare. We have just evolved to occupy a niche in the world it serves up. If the world were different so would we be. If the world changes too quickly for us to adapt, we’ve had it. Peering into these sulphurous pits induced an agreeable feeling of insignificance. You can’t argue with the earth’s core. It neither listens nor cares.

  Back at my hotel room I found this on the desk. It seemed to come from a different world: ‘Th
e buffet is packed with gastronomic sensations and is a feast for the taste buds and the eyes. Enjoy our live interactive cooking station, where you can select your own, personally chosen ingredients, that our talented chef will then cook to perfection.’

  It’s the standard hyperbole of commerce. We are all familiar with it. We know that the gastronomic sensation will be something nice to eat, that the live interactive cooking station will be a chef at a stove, that the ingredients we select (which will then magically become personally chosen) will consist of meat and vegetables, and that having them cooked to perfection will mean having them cooked. Such translation, such deflation of the verbal bubble, is necessary and, for most of us, effectively automatic.

  We are bombarded by absolutes and superlatives. I flick through a few pages of a Sunday magazine. For hair that looks 100 per cent vibrant. Reduce fat and cellulite in no time. Unblemished skin. Perfectly balanced. Five nights of absolute bliss. The merriest Christmas ever. Sheer indulgence. Amazing offer. The ultimate shopping experience. Not to be missed, once-in-a-lifetime, super, huge, massive, unrepeatable, and what does it all mean?

  It means heaven. It’s the perfectible world, a world born of our sense of time. My dog lacks that sense. Though he is, in his way, a perfect organism, calibrated to fit a niche in the actual world, he accepts things as they are and has no notion of their being better, let alone perfect. He lives only in the present. While his dinner is being assembled he may manage to think a few seconds ahead, and indeed may even try to hurry things along by sitting, but beyond that he has no grasp of the future tense. So he makes no plans. We do.

  Our sense of the future enables us to imagine tomorrow being better than today. From there it’s an obvious step to trying to make it so. This faculty of imagination has led to all the things from the plough to the internet that have made our lives easier and longer.

  The hypothetical end of that urge to make things better is to make them best. We can imagine a point beyond which things couldn’t be improved. Thus we conjure the world of Plato’s forms, or any of the other names we give to the notion of perfection. And it is into this notion, this sense of how things ought to be, that inflated language dips its greedy beak.

  OK! magazine parades a crew of characters, most of them actors on film or television, known to their readers by their first names. ‘Brad and Angie’s Bedroom Secrets’ bellows a headline, blithely ignoring the fact that a secret revealed is no longer a secret. (Not that the secrets amounted to much. Angie revealed that ‘she’s never been tied up’, and that she likes to talk in the bathtub. Brad was less forthcoming.)

  Angie and Brad are images rather than people. They occupy a different, better world. And they are venerated because they display all the qualities to which the congregation aspire — fame, wealth, looks and a spectacular, turbulent and vivid love life. They are, in other words, the ideal figures of our age. The gods they most resemble are the pagan crowd of pre-monotheistic times. These gods were far more entertaining than our current versions. They squabbled and shagged, were subject to envy, greed, lust and rage, conducting a sort of divine soap opera. They did what we did but bigger. Ditto the celebs.

  Except they don’t. Like the squabbling gods, the celebs of the gossip columns are fictional. The actual people whose names they bear, Brad, Angie and so on, are as sublunary dull as the rest of us. As Brad attains his shuddering climax that threatens the joints of the $15 million gold-plated four-poster, and then heaves himself from the quivering fevered loins of the exquisite, though unbound, Angie, I am confident that he, too, wonders quite whether that was it and feels a vague sense of having been duped.

  These people are stars. The name is significant. They are celestial beings. They’re the conscious creations of an industry founded with adamantine firmness on the potency of bullshit. For since movies began, the power of the camera to create characters who seem to be larger than life has been exploited to tap into our yearning, our hope. It was, from the outset, a deliberate exercise in propaganda, in the manufacture of mythology. And, in the best traditions of myth-manufacture throughout the history of the human species, it has proved hugely profitable.

  27

  Happy together

  Ask children what they want in life and they’ll tell you they want to fly helicopters or have a lot of children or drive a Ferrari or live in a mansion or be a fashion model or whatever. Ask them why and they’ll look at you oddly. It seems obvious to them. These things will make them happy.

  Just about everyone wants to be happy, and it’s a reasonable ambition. Happy is nicer than sad. Where the difficulty lies is in identifying and then securing happiness.

  We look fondly back on the past and realize, or at least believe, that we were happy then. We look fondly into the future and expect, or at least hope, that we may be happy then. But we tend not to notice whether we are happy in the present tense. For illustration you need only consider the children mentioned above. While describing the things they think will make them happy they would probably grin. And it would be the sort of open and endearing grin that most adults have lost the knack of, even those adults with a lot of children whom they shift from fashion shoot to mansion by Ferrari or helicopter.

  Unhappiness is easier. We have no difficulty knowing when we’re unhappy and we can generally identify the cause. Being spurned in love, bullied, in a bad job, in a worse marriage, scared, broke, sick, lonely, most of these are easily spotted and sometimes capable of remedy. But happiness and its causes are less easily defined. Happiness, it seems, is like Schrödinger’s cat: the moment it’s observed it shrivels.

  We are skilled, however, in spotting happiness in others. We recognize the symptoms instinctively — the bright eyes, the set of the shoulders, the openness, the smile — and we are drawn to them, because happiness is famously infectious. Indeed, though you rarely hear it acknowledged, one of the commonest causes of happiness is being in the company of happy people. Few of us grin much when alone.

  So we crave happiness but are poor at identifying its cause. At the same time we are good at spotting, and attracted by, happiness in others. All of which sets things up nicely for the bullshitter.

  In the February 2011 edition of KiaOra, the Air New Zealand in-flight magazine, the first ad to feature a human face shows a young man on a beach. He has sunglasses and fine teeth. He is piggybacking a young woman without sunglasses but with similarly fine teeth. I know about the teeth because both the young people are smiling broadly. Their skin is unblemished, the weather glorious, their bowels are under control and predators absent. This couple is happy. A faultless young couple in a faultless world is an image as old as our species. It’s the Garden of Eden. Every culture I know of has a similar myth. It enshrines the happiness we think we crave. It is bliss.

  The precise cause of the couple’s bliss is not made explicit. To the male mind it may seem that they are about to have sex on the beach, which is conveniently deserted. To the female mind it may seem that the two are firmly and joyously bonded. Either way, their situation seems desirable and unclouded by the imperfections that sully our own lives and loves.

  Now, which of the following is this image promoting?

  A holiday in Fiji?

  Tampons?

  Toothpaste?

  Life insurance?

  Household appliances?

  Underarm deodorant?

  The only one to which the image has any possible relevance is the Fijian holiday. And of course it is not an ad for a Fijian holiday. Nor, as it happens, is it an ad for any of the others. But we could readily imagine it being so. In the land of bullshit, happiness can be and is yoked to anything.

  The alternative world that assails our eyes and ears at every turn, that announces itself on billboards, on the television, from the radio, on the pages of newspapers and magazines, abounds in happiness, or at least in its symptoms. It smiles at us constantly. Yet we do not smile back. Look at the faces in the lift, in the street, and especially in the
shop, which is the place where most advertising suggests happiness is to be acquired.

  In my local supermarket there are posters of produce managers hung on the walls, beaming men and women who love their vegetables, their small goods, their bread, their meat. And, in case we are blind, a celebrity chef booms at us from the public address system, telling us in upbeat and phoney terms about the meals we can cook, the delights in store. The contrast between the tone of the voice and the faces in the checkout queue is comic. It is the gulf between the fantasy and the reality, between a synthetic heaven and an actual earth.

  In 1999 Richelle Roberts of California filed a grievance against her employer, the Safeway supermarket chain. Her gripe was the company’s ‘superior service’ policy, and in particular the requirement to ‘smile and make eye contact’ with every customer. To ensure that the requirement was met, Safeway sent ‘mystery shoppers’ into their stores. Mystery shoppers means spies.

  The problem lies in the word service. Service is courtesy, politeness, attentiveness. It acknowledges a relationship between a buyer and a seller. But smiling and eye contact denote personal interest. ‘Some customers mistake our friendliness for flirtation,’ said Ms Roberts. Of course they do. Being smiled at makes people feel good. Being smiled at by women makes men feel especially good. And it makes some stupid men believe they are desired.

  I have been unable to find the result of the case. I hope Safeway lost. Requiring one’s employees to fake the symptoms of happiness indiscriminately is to make a billboard of a human being. (Many people choose to live as billboards, of course, but they are generally paid very well to do so. And they can afford high walls to keep their more honest behaviour from the public eye — though as Tiger Woods and many another celebrity has discovered, it still tends to seep out.)